Long-term product design for a customer data platform growing from CDP into infrastructure, audiences, and activation.

Beginning with the product

I have worked with Meiro since the beginning as a long-term freelance product designer and remote contractor. The relationship started around the earliest versions of the product and grew with the company: from brand identity and marketing materials to product UX, interface systems, activation workflows, and new AI-assisted surfaces.

Meiro is a customer data platform and customer data infrastructure product for companies that need to collect, resolve, understand, and activate customer data without losing control of where that data lives. The platform now spans Meiro Pipes for customer data infrastructure, Meiro Audiences for unified profiles and segmentation, and Meiro Engage for activation through journeys and channels such as email, push, SMS, paid media, and WhatsApp.

From Material UI to a product system

In the early days, we built the application with Material UI. That was the right choice at the time: it let the team move quickly and gave engineering a practical foundation for common interface patterns. But as the product grew, the default component language started to show its limits. Meiro was not a generic dashboard. It had its own data concepts, interaction density, and mix of technical and non-technical users.

That led me to propose and gradually shape our own design system. The goal was not to make something decorative or overly custom. The goal was to create a language that matched the product: clearer hierarchy, better affordances for complex data work, more consistent states, and components that could support everything from segment building to customer profiles, integrations, analytics, activation channels, and later the newer Pipes and Engage experiences.

Over time, the product surface expanded. We started with Meiro CDP and Integrations, added Events after roughly three years, and only this year began work on Meiro Pipes, Engage, and Audiences. Each product needed to feel like part of the same platform, but not every user needed the same experience. A data engineer setting up event streams has different needs from a marketer creating an audience or launching a campaign.

A new way of working on Meiro Pipes

Meiro Pipes was built on the back of Meiro CDP. At first, it existed as a prototype, vibe-coded by our CTO. When I joined that process, it felt different from the product work we had done before. The prototype already carried a lot of product thinking in code, so my role was less about starting from a clean Figma file and more about entering an existing, moving system.

That was new, but it was also natural for me. I started my career as a front-end developer, and I have always liked tinkering with code. I had also been increasingly interested in moving toward a design engineer role. Pipes became a good place to test that shift in practice: I spent more time in code than in Figma, using new tools to refine states, adjust flows, and make the interface feel more intentional.

After a few rounds of experimentation, we had enough shared understanding to define a clearer plan. From there, my focus moved to polishing the UI and, more importantly, the flow. We wanted a strong first impression for new customers. Pipes is a technical product, but it still needs to feel precise, useful, and confidence-building from the first session.

Designing for technical users

Pipes serves data and engineering teams. It collects events from web, mobile, server, and external sources, resolves identity across touchpoints, and routes clean data into warehouses, analytics tools, activation systems, and the rest of the Meiro platform. Operational clarity became the priority.

For Pipes, we focused on data health. Users need to know whether data is flowing, whether events are valid, where a setup is incomplete, and what should be fixed next. The interface has to surface problems without creating panic: readable at a glance, detailed when users need to investigate.

A major part of the exploration was Piper, Meiro’s AI assistant. I tried several ways of making Piper useful without making it feel bolted on. In Pipes, the assistant should be close to the work: helping with setup, schema mapping, debugging, and explanation, without turning the whole product into a chat interface.

The onboarding for Pipes was deliberately more guided. Users follow a setup path for a demo instance, then create a pipe, and then connect a destination. This “on rails” approach helps them touch every crucial part of the app early: source, transformation, identity, routing, and output.

A different experience for Engage and Audiences

Engage and Audiences needed a different take. Where Pipes is for technical users, Engage and Audiences are closer to marketing and growth teams. By the time a marketing user opens Engage, the instance should already be set up. They should not be thinking about data plumbing. They should see what they can do now.

That changes the interface priorities. The product should show immediate actions, explain why they matter, and connect them to business impact. A marketer creating a segment, building a journey, or preparing an activation needs guidance, but not friction. The system should feel like a guide that is never far away and does not require the user to understand every technical layer underneath.

This is where the shared platform becomes interesting from a design perspective. Pipes, Audiences, and Engage use the same customer context, identity graph, and governance model, but the interface has to translate that into different mental models. For engineers, the product needs observability and control. For marketers, it needs confidence, clarity, and momentum.

Outcome

The main outcome is a broader product language for Meiro: one that can support technical infrastructure, customer profiles, segmentation, journeys, activation channels, AI assistance, and onboarding without every surface feeling like a separate product.

It is also a shift in how I work. Meiro started for me as a design and brand engagement, became a deep product design collaboration, and now increasingly includes design engineering. The useful part is not choosing between Figma and code. The useful part is getting closer to the product, understanding how it behaves, and shaping the experience where the real complexity lives.

For a platform like Meiro, that matters. The product is not just a collection of screens. It is a system that helps teams collect customer data, resolve identity, build audiences, and activate campaigns from the same trusted layer. My role has been to make that system feel clearer and more usable as it grows.